When Meghan Markle arrived at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, Britain, for her wedding to Prince Harry, her stunning, elegantly minimal dress rightly garnered heaps of attention from around the world.
There’s a quick but memorable moment in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II where Marty McFly, an American teenager transported decades forward to 2015, encounters a futuristic pair of Nike hightop sneakers. He slips his feet into them, and to his amazement, they automatically cinch, the laces tightening around his feet.
Another British royal wedding is upon us.
Sneaker-unboxing videos are an addictive strain of internet content, and YouTube personality Jacques Slade is a leading name in the genre. Between his roughly 851,000 YouTube subscribers and the many more who find Slade online, videos of him unboxing Jordans, Yeezys, and other rare and coveted shoes can rack up well over a million views each.
When Chip Bergh was a middle-schooler growing up in suburban New York, he made his mother drive him to the next town over to buy a pair of rigid Levi’s 501s. Back then, the now-60-year-old Levi’s CEO says, the jeans brand had a deep meaning to American kids.
Macy’s is off to a better start to 2018 than anyone saw coming, including Macy’s itself.
The fashion manufacturers in China have gotten so good that they’ve earned public praise from Miuccia Prada herself (paywall).
Officially, the Cannes Film Festival doesn’t specify how tall a woman’s heel must be to attend its glitzy events.
On the same day that a US appeals court upheld Adidas’s right to bar Skechers from selling what Adidas says is a knockoff of its Stan Smith sneaker, Skechers threw the first punch in a new legal fight.
Since 2010, Adidas has cut the share of footwear it makes in China in half. The country that has absorbed most of that business is Vietnam.
What does Catholicism have in common with fashion? For one thing, a fixation on bodies.
The red carpet of the Met Gala isn’t covered on TV like Hollywood red carpets are. Instead, fashion’s biggest party, which each year celebrates the opening of the new exhibit by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, plays out on social media—particularly on Instagram, where fashion labels compete for attention and buzz.
Foot Locker announced in March that it would close more than 100 US stores this year, and stories attributing the news to a “retail apocalypse” quickly followed. The company’s CEO, Dick Johnson, has some thoughts on those headlines: They totally missed the point.
Mohair is on its way out at some of the world’s biggest international clothing companies.
When Chip Bergh joined Levi’s as CEO in September 2011, the American clothing company was in a slump. “In ’96, we were bigger than Nike,” he says, “and then from ’96 to 2001, [we] went from $7.1 billion dollars in sales to $4.1 billion in sales. They lost almost half of the business.”
You know you have influence when a brand has to move to a larger factory just because you wore its jeans.
For everyday shoppers, the big promise of all the technology that’s changing how sneakers are made is that it could ultimately enable brands to offer fast, fairly affordable, truly custom shoes. That is, not just letting you design the color scheme and get your initials stitched on—which plenty of brands already do—but actually get shoes tailored to the individual shapes of your feet, with your performance needs in mind, like brands often make for their pro athletes.
The US retail industry is going through an upheaval. Right now, store closures across the country are on pace to set a record in terms of how much square footage will shut down this year.
It would take weeks before the full number of dead from the Rana Plaza factory collapse was clear. “Each time we moved a slab of concrete, we found a stack of bodies,” Brigadier-General Siddiqul Alam, the Bangladeshi army officer who oversaw the recovery operation, told the BBC on May 10, 2013.
Donald Trump’s threat of a new round of tariffs on China has consumer goods companies on edge. While they were generally spared (paywall) in the last round, Trump on April 4 directed the US trade representative to consider another set of tariffs totaling $100 billion. This time, experts think it’s inevitable (paywall) that consumer products, such as clothing and shoes, would get hit.
One of the most surprising things Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed in his April 18 letter to shareholders was that Amazon Prime now has more members than people who live in Germany.
For sneaker brands, 3D printing has incredible potential. It’s allowing brands to make new products, like Adidas’s Futurecraft 4D sneakers, which have already released to the public in limited numbers. Behind the scenes, it’s also enabling them to create prototypes faster than ever, helping to speed up how quickly they’re able to devise new styles and get them to market.
It took Nike chemists, engineers, and designers more than three years of development before the company was ready to release its new Epic React shoes this past February. The first running shoe to combine Nike’s React cushioning platform with the company’s signature Flyknit uppers, it made for the lightest and bounciest Nike shoes yet, and gave the company a new way to compete against its biggest adversary, Adidas.
Just over 20 years ago, a crazed 27-year-old narcissist named Andrew Cunanan murdered Gianni Versace on the steps of the designer’s Miami home. Versace by then had built a successful global fashion brand known for unabashedly glamorous dresses worn by actresses and models.
